Belmont chronicle. [volume] (St. Clairsville, Ohio) 1855-1973, 1887-10-06
A NEW JERSEY MARL PIT.
The Deposits Near Kirkwood Rich Il
Fossils of Various Kinds.

The Deposits Near Kirkwood Rich In
Fossils of Various Kinds.
But, perhaps, the average excursionist or
lot buyer does not know that near Kirkwood
is one of she most valuable deposits of mari
known. What appears from the railroad like
the deep cut of a parallel road is, in reality,
a series of pits, marking broad, straight
path through acres of watermelon and can
taloupe fields and swamps overgrown with
sedges and cat tails. In time the whole sec
ton of the country will probably be scanned
and honeycombed, as the deposit shows no
signs of exhaustion. The very dust of the
ground is filled with particles of the mari,
and the foot tracks on the boards of the sta
tion platform are green.
The richest layers are only few feet below
the surface Of the ground, and it is readily
dug out. In color it is of blackish or gray
ish green, and it appears to be about the con-
sistency of -four. Its principal use is to make
fertilizers. Deposits of mari crop out in va
rious parts of New Jersey, particularly in the
ueighborhood of Haddonfeld. Some of these
are rich in fossils-the one at Kirkwood,
however, is less so than Others. Your eorre-
spondent was quite fortunate in securing two
squirrels heads, tooth, possibly sharks.
and several pieces of bone.
One of the heads is almost perfect and
shows plainly the form Of the ears, eyes and
nose. The mouth was intact, but was acci-
dentally broken after it had been dug out.
The head appears as if it had been modelled
in putty and is of the same grayish tint. The
other head has the ears broken off, but it
showed very plainly the hair on the cheek.
The tooth is completely petrified, green
ish tinge varying the dirty ivory brown. The
hollow is filled with green mari. The pieces
of bone are hard and stony; one bit, which
looks like tooth or fragment of vertebre,
of the same putty tint as the squirrels heads,
the others being greenish. All show perfectly
the spongy structure, the intergtices filed
with particles of mari.
A few bones and trilobites, or impressions
of shells, may be found by any enthusiastic
seeker who visits the mari pits He need not
expect to discover anything like the enor-
nous skeleton unsarthed some years ago near
H1ddonfield and now on exhibition in the
Academy of Natural Sciences.
Mari is made up of enormous quantities of
decomposed shells. All of the eastern and
southern parts of New Jersey were once prob
ably the bed of the sea, which latter, as it
retreated, left this calcareous deposit behind.
The writer did not learn how the heads Of
land animals, as squirrels came to be left in
the oceans old bed, or whether these fossils
were positively proved to be squirrels heads
There is no doubt, however, about the pieces
of bone. Similar deposits of mari have been
found on the Atlantic coasts OF South Amer
lea and Africa, and it is known that the
present bed of the ocean is largely made up
of minute chalky shells; so it would seem
likely enough that the region of peaches and
watermelons was once the sporting ground
of prehistoric monsters.-Cor. Philadelphia
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